Subway Thread

[TalB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/ny...ion&oref=login
Some Subways Found Packed Past Capacity

By WILLIAM NEUMAN
Published: June 26, 2007


Kitra Cahana/The New York Times

Passengers packed into a No. 4 train at Grand Central Terminal Monday. Crowding on that line during the morning rush exceeds guidelines.

They are just lines on a graph, but for many subway riders they will provide unique insight into one of the great aggravations of life underground: why trains on some lines are so often both crowded and late, while on other lines the trains seem to cruise along on schedule with almost no one on board.

In an unusually candid effort at self-examination for a habitually insular agency, New York City Transit yesterday presented what could be called an index of straphanger frustration. It made an analysis of each subway line that shows at a glance how often trains run late, how crowded they are and whether more trains could be added to ease the problems.

What is revealed is both predictable and eye-opening. Many subway lines are simply maxed out, meaning there is no room on the tracks they use to add trains that could carry the swelling numbers of riders. And that has implications that range from day-to-day decisions about how trains travel through the system to long-term planning on how to best move people around a growing city.

“From my point of view, this is scary,” said Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, who presented the data to members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s board. “This is scary in the sense that right now, on a lot of these lines, we’re several years and a big capital construction project away from being able to provide what I consider adequate service. We’re constrained.”

Mr. Roberts said the data had particular significance in light of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s proposal for a congestion pricing system that would charge most drivers who enter Manhattan below 86th Street — with the intent of moving people out of their cars and onto mass transit.

Mr. Roberts said that on many subway lines, especially the heavily used numbered lines, there is little or no room to accommodate more riders.

“It’s bad news,” Mr. Roberts said. “There’s no room at the inn.”

If congestion pricing becomes a reality, planners will have to rely on additional bus service as a way to increase the transit system’s capacity.

Mr. Roberts had his staff compile the data to solve a mystery he encountered after taking over the nation’s largest transit system in April. He said that he noticed that the subway’s A division (the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 lines) regularly operated with about 7 percent more late or canceled trains than the B division, (all the letter lines and the No. 7 line.) The 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 trains are part of the old IRT system, the city’s first subway.

What Mr. Roberts discovered was that most of the A division lines are being stretched to their limit in two ways: no additional trains can be added to the schedule during rush hours because the tracks they use are already handling the maximum number possible, and most of the rush hour trains are already crammed with an overflow of riders.

Crowding is so bad that on the 4, 5, 6 and L lines, trains during the morning rush exceed the transit agency’s loading guidelines, which posit that every rider should have at least a three-square-foot space to stand in (that translates to a square patch of car floor 20 inches on each side).

Crowded trains can lead to delays because it takes people more time to get in and out of the cars.

But the real squeeze results from the crowded tracks. Trains must operate with enough space between them so they have room to stop to avoid a collision. That limits the number of trains that can fit on a stretch of track. And when a track is operating at full capacity, even small delays —like those caused by a passenger who is ill or someone holding a door open while a friend races down the stairs — can have a big impact.

“You get to the point where the slightest deviation in schedule causes a backup and what is sometimes referred to as ‘the wave,’ ” Mr. Roberts said. “One train slows down for any reason and it starts a wave back up the system.”

He compared the most heavily used tracks to a highway with bumper-to-bumper traffic, where someone slowing down or changing lanes can force drivers far behind to put on the brakes.

The information presented yesterday brings the problem into clear focus.

The No. 4 and 5 trains share the express track on the Lexington Avenue line in Manhattan. The track is at full capacity, with a total of 27 trains an hour running during the morning peak. In addition, peak ridership on both lines exceeds the guidelines, with more people jamming onto cars than the cars are meant to hold.

It is no wonder, then, that in April, riders on the No. 4 line suffered through the greatest number of late trains, with only 83.2 percent of trains running on time. The No. 5 train was not far ahead, with 87.2 percent of trains on time.

It was a far different story on another set of tracks. The J, Z and M trains, which run from Queens to Manhattan and Brooklyn, are far from using their full capacity, both on the tracks and inside the cars. All three lines had an on-time performance close to 99 percent in April.

Mr. Roberts said that he is trying to find solutions to these problems. He has asked the agency’s engineers to study the feasibility of extending the length of the platforms on the most crowded lines, to allow for longer trains. On the Lexington Avenue line, that could mean running 12-car trains instead of the current 10-car trains, a 20 percent increase in capacity. But a project of that magnitude would take several years to complete.

Other long-term solutions are also years away, including a new Second Avenue subway and expansion of a computerized signal system that would allow the trains to run closer together, increasing the number that could run on the tracks.

[TalB]

Here is the new entrance to the Bowling Green station after replacing the one that was there before.

[hkskyline]

NY can't offer adequate subway svc for yrs-official

NEW YORK, June 25 (Reuters) - Any relief for New York City straphangers, who now endure overcrowded and often delayed trains, is several years away, even if the money is found to improve them, the president of New York City Transit said on Monday.

"From our point of view, this is scary," Howard Roberts, who was appointed to run the subway arm of the state mass transit agency in April, told reporters.

"We're several years and a big capital project away from being able to provide what I call adequate service," he continued, releasing a chart that showed key north-south lines on Manhattan's west and east sides were way over capacity.

New York somehow lost the courage to build new subways back around World War Two, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says. He proposed charging weekday Manhattan drivers $8 a car during peak hours from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. to help raise some of the billions of dollars needed for new links, but that plan stalled in the state legislature last week.

Bloomberg's plan also risks burdening the already stretched mass-transit system if the new anti-traffic fees succeed in encouraging drivers to take trains and buses.

That is why the city and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, an umbrella transit agency, are focused on adding express buses to handle the new customers.

New York City's new transit chief delivered his unvarnished warning just a few weeks before the MTA starts drafting a new budget. The nation's biggest mass transit agency, with around 8 million daily riders, not only must close billion-dollar shortfalls in future years, but still lacks $1 billion for its new Second Ave. Subway.

Work began on that line -- the first since 1936 -- in April, but its first leg, which will carry riders from 92nd St. on Manhattan's East Side south to 62nd St., only opens in 2013.

And speeding trips for the millions of riders who now rely on the east side's Lexington Ave. subway and the west side's 1,2 and 3 lines, could require costly and time-consuming fixes, such as lengthening stations so they can handle more trains at one time as well as improving signals and controls.

"If we were able to speed the system up, that's probably four to five years (away)," Roberts said. His engineers should finish a feasibility study by the end of June, he said, adding it was too early to say what those improvements might cost -- and how many stations could be lengthened at one time.

Unlike commuter railroads, subway riders cannot simply walk forward several cars if a station is too short, he said, if only because the stops simply are too brisk.

"There is a limit to how fast you can get, how many cars you can put in a tunnel ... how many cars can get through a tunnel in an hour," he said.

The Lexington and the 1,2,3 lines are some of the city's busiest lines, carrying riders from the Bronx south through Manhattan and into Brooklyn. They now are so over-stretched that even minor delays can ripple into lengthy waits.

Even the Second Ave subway will not be enough to fix the system-wide crowding, let alone handle the 1 million new residents expected to to New York by 2030, Roberts added.

Bloomberg, who recently left the Republican Party and changed his political status to independent, on Monday told reporters he was still hopeful that the legislature will enact his new traffic-busting fees.

As straphangers fret the MTA might raise its current $2 base subway and bus fare, he cited another gaping problem: "Nobody's planning new service up in Brooklyn and parts of the Bronx."

The Lexington line is so jammed that a fiscal monitor has proposed ripping out the seats to pack more people in, noted Gene Russianoff, a transit advocate with the Straphangers Campaign. "I was pretty outraged," he said, adding this would have been tough for riders with long interborough trips.

[hkskyline]

After two years, NYPD keeps up pace of subway bag searches
6 July 2007

NEW YORK (AP) - Two years after starting random searches of passengers' bags on America's biggest subway system, police still set up more than 300 checkpoints per week, a police spokesman said.

The inspections are conducted in each of the city's 468 subway stations at least 35 times a year, spokesman Paul Browne said. He said the searches are conducted for several hours at a stretch and at all times of day.

The police department won't give many details about the searches, including their locations, because "we don't want to telegraph that information to the enemy, to people who would kill New Yorkers," Browne said.

The inspections began as a response to the suicide bombings that killed 52 people on London's subway and bus system on July 7, 2005. Terrorism experts say the random approach helps deter potential attackers by keeping them guessing.

"When you have randomness, it is more effective than when you do it all the time," said Timothy P. Connors, the director of the Center for Policing Terrorism at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative-leaning think tank. "If you have a predictable regimen, it can be exploited."

But the New York Civil Liberties Union challenged the inspections in court, saying they were an unprecedented intrusion on privacy and an ineffective, easily evaded tactic. A federal appeals court upheld the constitutionality of the inspections in August 2006, calling the terrorism threat "substantial and real" and the searches "reasonably effective."

An NYCLU lawyer continued to question the practice Thursday.

"We fully support subway security measures," said the lawyer, Christopher Dunn. But he said the searches cover so few subway stations at any given time that they "cannot be effective enough to justify suspicionless police searches of law-abiding New Yorkers."

Browne, the police spokesman, said the program "is what it is."

"We've never said it's every place, all the time," he said.

[cincobarrio]

stupid pigs are wasting their time, nothing new though...

[TalB]

http://www.nydailynews.com/boroughs/...al_commut.html
Make the F train an express, local commuters and pols urge

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BY DENISE ROMANO

Tuesday, July 10th 2007, 4:00 AM

For many Brooklyn straphangers, "F" still stands for "frustrating."

The borough's elected officials added steam last week to a grassroots movement to restore express service to the F train.

"I keep looking at the express track and wondering why it isn't being used," Councilman Bill de Blasio (D-Kensington) said at a rally Thursday. "We have to move this as quickly as humanly possible."

Local leaders and commuters have urged the Transit Authority to run the F train express, and to extend the V train into Brooklyn, where it would make local stops.

The F travels from Jamaica-179th St. in Queens, through Manhattan to Coney Island-Stillwell Ave.

The V runs between Forest Hills-71st Ave. in Queens and lower East Side-Second Ave. in Manhattan.

Both trains run local, and the TA refers to both as the Sixth Avenue Local.

"This is the right thing to do for our community," said Gary Reilly, who organized an online petition that has collected over 2,600 signatures.

But transit officials countered that there was not enough demand for it. Furthermore, a major construction project to give a much-needed face-lift to the elevated F train stations rules out restoring express service before 2012, a TA spokesman said.

Councilman Domenic Recchia (D-Coney Island) said making the F run express should precede the construction, known as the Culver Viaduct project.

"We have been waiting too long on this local line," he said, adding that some F trains run to Kings Highway and turn back, giving no service to Gravesend and Coney Island residents.

"Don't renovate stations, start with making the F express," Recchia said.

Councilman Simcha Felder (D-Borough Park) recalled riding on express F trains, which were discontinued in 1977.

"The express track exists but only rodents are riding it," he said, referring to the tracks that run under the Bergen St. station and stop at the Seventh Ave. and Church Ave. stations.

"It's not being used, but it's there," he said.

The issue was raised at a TA board meeting last week, according to a spokesman. Howard Roberts, president of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority - the TA's parent agency - said managers would examine what can be done, the spokesman said.

[TalB]

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_21...aphangers.html
Volume 20 Issue 9 | July 13 - 19, 2007

Cortlandt straphangers will wait another few years for reopening

The Cortlandt St. N/R station will be closed indefinitely, a representative from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority told Community Board 1 Monday night.

Besides the Cortlandt St. setback, the news Monday was mostly positive regarding progress on the M.T.A.’s Fulton Transit Hub, scheduled to open in mid-2009. New station entrances are opening, the project’s final contract has gone out to bid and the M.T.A. has pledged to exceed certain environmental requirements in its next phase of work.

The opening of the revamped Cortlandt St. N/R station was postponed six months last fall, but now, M.T.A. representative Uday Durg said, it will remain closed for the foreseeable future. The M.T.A.’s work on the station has been complete for months, but the station entrance sits within the Port Authority’s staging area for World Trade Center construction. The M.T.A. and the Port had been working to find a solution, but those efforts have not been successful. Therefore the station will stay closed until the Port is done using the site — 2009 at the earliest, according to Port representative Quentin Brathwaite.

The news at other stations is cheerier. On June 30, a new entrance to the northbound 4/5 platform opened at Maiden Ln. and Broadway. A new southbound entrance is scheduled to open across Broadway by the second week in August. Also by mid-August, four buildings along Broadway should be fully deconstructed.

A Request For Proposals has gone out for the M.T.A.’s last, and largest, contract. The final contract will include the new Fulton Transit Hub building, with an open atrium and retail corridor, as well as the completion of new ramps and underground passageways to connect 12 different subway lines in the area. The exception is the so-called E connector, which will link the Fulton hub to the W.T.C. transit hub. That passageway will now be designed and constructed by the Port Authority.

As a part of the final M.T.A. contract, the agency is requiring that all heavy trucks on the project use both ultra low sulfur diesel and exhaust filters — measures that should reduce the amount of toxic fumes in the neighborhood. That news delighted environmental advocate Catherine McVay Hughes, who chairs C.B. 1’s W.T.C. committee. Hughes has long pushed for cleaner fuel and truck filters. Although a new state law requires many public projects to use the low sulfur diesel, it does not require every truck to have an exhaust filter until 2010.

After some wheedling by Hughes, the Port representatives at the meeting agreed to at least talk to the M.T.A. about their new “above and beyond” environmental standards and to consider using those standards for future Port contracts.

— Skye H. McFarlane

© 2007 Community Media, LLC

[hkskyline]

[hkskyline]

Report: Nearly two thirds of New York sunbway riders say they have been sexually harassed
26 July 2007

NEW YORK (AP) - A new report finds that 63 percent of New Yorkers said they had been sexually harassed in the city's subways.

The report, titled "Hidden in Plain Sight," also found that 96 percent of respondents who had been harassed said they did not report the incident -- indicating that such behavior is widely accepted, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said Thursday.

"The credo of `what happens underground, stays underground' has got to be broken," said Stringer. "The harassment and assault of women in the subway system has been going on for decades."

The survey was compiled from responses from 1,790 subway riders in all five New York City boroughs. Stringer said the results were not scientific, but that the report provides "an invaluable snapshot of a problem that persists but is inherently difficult to quantify."

The New York Police Department responded that crime on the transit system is at a record low, and police have arrested 119 people this year for sexual abuse or lewdness on the subways. Jeremy Soffin, spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said his agency's work with police has contributing to record numbers of subway riders.

Stringer's office partnered with 20 other groups in disseminating the survey via e-mail.

The report defined harassment as unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, flashing, groping, fondling and public masturbation. The vast majority of the victims were females, the study indicated.

[Taylorhoge]

Bowling Green looks amazing brand new platform,new entrance,stairwells hopefully the system will be getting better.

[hkskyline]

Report: Safety rules ignored in deaths of NYC subway workers
2 August 2007

NEW YORK (AP) - The first detailed accounts of what led to the deaths of two subway workers in April show that basic safety guidelines were flouted and supervisors failed to alert train operators that workers were on the tracks.

The reports released Wednesday by New York City Transit called for a broad overhaul of safety practices and for discipline to be considered for the three supervisors whose actions contributed to the workers' deaths.

Howard H. Roberts Jr., the president of New York City Transit, told The New York Times in its Thursday editions that the agency was working with the Transport Workers Union to reduce chances of such accidents occurring again.

"There are major barriers, the primary one being cultural, that we have to figure out how to handle," he said. "In many cases people do not follow the rules and consider the rules in some cases not to be particularly pertinent to how they see themselves as getting the work done."

A board of inquiry made of transit officials and union representatives authored the reports on the workers' deaths.

Daniel Boggs, 41, was struck by a train near Columbus Circle on April 24, and Marvin Franklin was hit by a train at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in downtown Brooklyn.

The report on Franklin's death said that "organizational culture was such that critical safety rules were not practiced in day-to-day operations."

It also detailed how a supervisor who was supposed to be acting as a flagman, watching for oncoming trains, left his post; and how, moments later, a train plowed through the station, striking Franklin and another worker, who was hurt but survived.

The supervisor who was supposed to be the flagman told the report's authors that he never left his post. Instead, he said, he tried warning the endangered workers that they were "on the wrong track." That testimony was contradicted by others who testified for the board of inquiry.

The report did not lay full blame on the supervisor. It also described how Franklin and the other worker broke safety rules.

The report on Boggs' death said he crossed over to an express track that he may have thought was closed to traffic -- as had been scheduled. But train controllers had kept it open temporarily because of a stalled train on another track.

Boggs' supervisor, the report said, failed to communicate with train controllers to warn them that the subway worker was on the express track when a downtown train roared down it.

Following the two accidents in April, New York City Transit suspended all track work and those who do maintenance in the subways were retrained on all elements of safety.

[MrColombia]

Heavy Rain that fell over night flooded several lines in the NYC Subway, forcing passengers to take bus.

LOOK AT THE CAOS, it looks like NYC better star thinking of implementing a BRT system of buses on land to prevent these delays when something happens in the SUBWAY.

[hkskyline]

Restoring Trust in Mass Transit
12 August 2007
The New York Times

Residents, commuters and visitors showed a tremendous amount of grace and forbearance last week when torrential rains closed much of the subway system. Despite uncomfortable heat and humidity, they piled into overburdened buses and found other ways to cope. Now that everyone has had a chance to cool off, officials need to work overtime to regain the public's confidence in mass transit.

That's especially critical now. The federal Department of Transportation is expected to announce this week whether New York will get necessary funding to relieve traffic congestion. For months, the Bloomberg administration has been selling the benefits -- including cleaner air and less gridlock -- of charging a fee to use the city's busiest streets. But if people are to be persuaded to forget the car and use mass transportation, they'll need more than the financial disincentive of the proposed $8 fee for cars.

At the very least, commuters will need to believe that there will be adequate numbers of express bus and ferry routes that do not now exist, and that subways will be dependable. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs mass transit, will also need to do a better job communicating with the public. Of all the indignities suffered last week, among the worst was feeling that no one cared enough to keep riders informed. It's past time to move the system into the 21st century, to figure out ways to send text messages to people who sign up for such a service, and to borrow ideas from other systems like the Paris Metro -- which is just about as old as the New York system, but offers riders electronic signage on platforms that informs them precisely when the next train will arrive. Parisians are thus disinclined to mob trains, knowing another is just behind.

If Washington comes through, state and city elected leaders, including Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, will begin assembling a commission to come up with a plan that relieves gridlock. The inclination will be to load up the panel with the usual suspects. We hope they fight that urge, and include independent voices who can speak for New Yorkers who want a daily commute they can count on and timely information when things go wrong.

[hkskyline]

No. 7 subway train gets a C- from NYC riders in MTA survey
30 August 2007

NEW YORK (AP) - Riders of the No. 7 train gave the subway line a C-minus for overall performance in a Metropolitan Transit Authority survey released Thursday, and officials promised to improve their performance.

The subway line was graded based on areas of service like on-time arrivals, lack of graffiti in stations and easy use of turnstiles.

Based on the results, MTA officials will develop improvement plans which will be reviewed by New York City Transit President Howard Roberts.

There was no estimate on when improvement plans would be implemented.

MTA officials handed out more than 88,000 surveys during morning rush hour and riders could respond via mail or online in 13 different languages. Nearly 16,000 questionnaires were returned; most by mail and about 4,000 online.

The survey also asked riders to prioritize 10 areas they would like to see improved. At the top of the list was adequate room on board at rush hour, followed by minimal delays during trips, reasonable wait times for trains and train announcements that are easy to hear.

The survey was the first customer report card undertaken by the MTA, and transit officials are currently accepting responses from customers who ride the L, J and Z trains.

The survey is not the same as the annual report of the subway system by the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. That report ranks the city's subway lines, and this year found No. 1 was the best, while the C and W lines were deemed the worst.

[TalB]

There are some advantages and disadvantages on deciding whether it's better to take the fastest rout or fewer trains.

Fastest route
Advantage: Gives the most direct route from one place to the other.
Disadvantage: Can involve taking several subway lines.

Fewer trains
Advantage: Easier to remember and little or no transfers.
Disadvantage: Can take longer by it route.

[thf5007]

Originally Posted by Taylorhoge

Bowling Green looks amazing brand new platform,new entrance,stairwells hopefully the system will be getting better.

You know what the problem is.. we don't maintain the stations well here like they do in most of Europe. We need to purchase power washers and those small street cleaning machines (similiar to sweet sweepers) and use them on a regular basis.

[hkskyline]

+ get rid of the beggars living in the tunnels.

[koolkid]

DEFINITELY!

This beggar approached me and began acting all silly. It was really uncomfortable. Then she took out a needle! Thats when i really got worried and got away as fast as i could. I'd take the bitch down no problem but god knows what kind of substances that needle could've had. (aids?)
These people are very dangerous. I hope we get rid of them soon!

[TalB]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Longest, and Possibly Coolest, A Train Still a-Thrumming at 75

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: September 10, 2007


BETTMANN/CORBIS

Riders boarded an A train on March 20, 1933, during the opening of the Bergen Street station in Brooklyn. The A train started running in 1932.


Patrick Andrade for The New York Times

Along its 31-mile route, the A train travels past a graveyard in Ozone Park, Queens.

On Sept. 10, 1932, one minute after midnight, a 7-year-old boy named Billy Reilly dropped a nickel into a turnstile and boarded an A train at 42nd Street. It was a southbound express, and it was Billy’s first ride on an A.

It was the city’s first ride, too — 171,267 passengers rode it that September day in 1932, its first day of operation. The line, then called the Eighth Avenue subway, spanned only 12 miles and 28 stations, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom.

Some 75 years later, the A line stretches farther than it did back then, literally and culturally.

Over the years, the A line has become less of a train and more of an icon, a symbol of the nearly 500,000 varied and eclectic New Yorkers and others it carries through the city daily. The A line is certainly not the oldest run in New York’s subway system, nor has it ever been the smoothest-running, the most punctual or even the cleanest. But an argument could be made, thanks in part to Duke Ellington’s up-tempo stamp of approval, that it is perhaps the coolest.

“There’s no 6 train song or D train song,” said Dr. John Morrow, 33, a cardiologist who rode a packed A train recently on his way to lunch. “The A train has a little more cultural significance.”

Today, on the A line’s 75th birthday, transit officials will celebrate with a ceremony at the start of the line at the Inwood/207th Street station. A special train made up of six prewar cars is scheduled to provide service along the line’s original route to the Chambers Street stop in Lower Manhattan.

Back in 1932, the new subway was part of the Independent Subway System, or the IND, the first city-owned subway network. The IND competed with two private subway systems, the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation and the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, which opened first, in 1904. The city took control of the BMT and IRT in 1940.

The Eighth Avenue subway, which took seven years to build, was the IND’s first line, and it dazzled riders with longer stations to accommodate 10- and 11-car trains, wider platforms and sleek R1 cars manufactured by Pullman Standard.

“The R1 cars that ran on the A train at that time were phenomenal,” said Stan Fischler, a subway historian who has written several books about the city’s subway system. “If you had put air-conditioning into them, they’d be good enough to run today.”

The A train is the longest line in the system — 31 miles, from northern Manhattan through Brooklyn to Far Rockaway in Queens. New York City Transit, the arm of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that operates the subways, says it is the longest subway line in the world.

The A often feels like the city’s very own transcontinental railroad, traveling deep under the ground and soaring high above it, below the bustle of Washington Heights, past old tombstones in graveyards in Ozone Park, over the waters of Jamaica Bay. Perhaps the most famous section is the run under Harlem heard between the notes of Ellington’s recording of “Take the A Train,” which was written by Billy Strayhorn.

“Think about what a bargain it is,” Mr. Fischler said. “For two bucks you go all the way to Rockaway. Do you realize what that would cost you in a taxi? You couldn’t afford the tip.”

There is a strange symmetry to the line. You step on at the 207th Street station in Inwood in northern Manhattan, and you step off at the Far Rockaway/Mott Avenue terminal in Queens, near a western Long Island hamlet named Inwood. (Some trips end in Ozone Park and some in Rockaway Park.)

Those riding the A train the weekend before its anniversary, however, could hardly enjoy such uninterrupted, long-distance travel: Because of weekend track work, people had to board shuttle buses to get from Howard Beach to the Rockaways.

“I did not know I was going to be on a bus, but you kind of expect it on weekends,” said Shamiyah Brown, 27, who rode the shuttle bus with her seven children and her niece on Saturday. “I’m not surprised.”

The A train’s first registered complaint was apparently made just minutes after it began running, when a man at the Chambers Street station became upset because he had put two nickels into a malfunctioning turnstile.

Since then, the line has gotten mixed reviews from passengers and the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group. In the group’s latest report card, which ranks the city’s 22 main subway lines from best to worst, the A train was tied for 12th place. The group found, among other things, that the line arrives with below-average regularity.

The A line has been crippled by fires (the January 2005 blaze at the Chambers Street station, for instance) and has seen its share of tragic and bizarre occurrences.

The limbs and torso of a 19-year-old Brooklyn man were found in a blue plastic bag in a tunnel in 2005. Pigeons have been known to step aboard trains at the outdoor Far Rockaway stop and casually step off at the next station. In May 1993, a man posing as a subway motorman took an A train with hundreds of passengers for a three-and-a-half-hour ride. He made 85 stops, and arrived on time at the Ozone Park/Lefferts Boulevard station.

On Saturday afternoon, the line that carried Billy Reilly on its inaugural run — he moved to the front of the crowd at the 42nd Street station when a transportation commissioner learned he was born the day of the new subway’s groundbreaking, March 14, 1925 — carried Dr. Morrow, who sat reading and listening to a Tom Waits song on his iPod.

It carried Ernest Rivera, 28, an unemployed father of three from Brooklyn. It carried Gunther, a Manhattan couple’s white puppy. It carried a middle-aged woman with a tattoo on her chest, a man holding a surfboard and another man who had remembered to wear his A train T-shirt.

Rudy Worrell, 54, knelt on the floor and played his flute and duct-taped keyboard. Mr. Worrell remembered taking the A train as a boy, to play hooky from school. Years later, he would return to the A, unemployed and homeless, playing his music aboard it for small donations.

“This is my bread and butter,” he said as the train rumbled along. “Ain’t nothing like the A train.”

William Neuman contributed reporting.

[TalB]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007...o_have_pl.html
New subway station at 34th St. to have platform safety doors
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday, September 11th 2007, 4:00 AM

The No. 7 line station slated for the far West Side will feature platform doors that could prevent falls - or pushes - to the tracks.

The platform doors will open when a train pulls into the new station planned for 34th St. and 11th Ave., which is part of the city's redevelopment plans for the area.

Such floor-to-ceiling sliding doors in transit hubs in other systems have helped control crowds and reduced the scrums to get onboard that erupt when trains enter very busy stations, officials said.

"We'll see how it works in the New York City subway environment," Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Jeremy Soffin said.

The extension of the 7 line from Times Square to 11th Ave. is a $2.1 billion project to be mostly funded by the city. It's scheduled to be completed in 2013. MTA officials said the mechanical doors will cost about $2million per platform.

Pete Donohue